Saturday, 13 April 2013

Recently I have joined a hangout with Steve Blank who is a retired serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in high technology management and Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Graduate School of Engineering STVP Program. Steve Blank has out lined that no matter what business vertical you're entering, emerging business start-up, including market opportunity, market regulations and distribution, competitors and complimentors, and technology breakthroughs.Take this course and start learning about becoming an entrepreneur. There are lots of questions are asked by participants but a few of them are given here for our readers.

1. Check out factors of an E-entrepreneur :-

Entrepreneurship is what makes the world go round today. It was an excellent solution of employment some two-three decades ago, though at that time, it was substantially more expensive to set one up, than is today. Today, an enterprise can be set up in no time, at a cost that it will make you laugh with incredulity. Yet, it is true. Anyone can start an e-entrepreneurship today, with the least risk and the least investment. The odds for making the business a success are the same today as these were 30 years ago; however, today you have less to risk and much, much more to gain. If you fail today, it is not because of lack of resources, exposure or initiative; it may be only because of lack of effort in the right direction.

2. How to kick and start e-enterprise:-

The task is easier today, however each step has to be mastered to perfection to be successful. The first step in establishing an e-enterprise is to identify a product or service that you want to start your e-enterprise with. Once you have that, a thorough market research will be needed. In real life a market questionnaire would give you the answer. On the Internet you will get the answer from keyword tools such as Word Tracker which will give you the number of times people have looked it up. Run this test on other words – preferably words which represent the most successful e-commerce sites and the comparison will give you an idea about your keyword. You may also visit the websites which are already selling what you plan to sell. Check them out and find out whether you would go there yourself or you would like to improvise on it. The points to check out are,
(i) the overall look of the website,
(ii) the products and/or services offered and the way they are presented,
(iii) search engine ranking,
(iv) page rank (this you can get with the help of google tool bar),
(v) keywords and
(vi) back links (check out how many sites link to the site in question).

3. Choose a domain name, create a website and choose a web host :–

Your “shop” on the net is called a domain. Before setting up your domain on the net, it will need an appropriate name. Try to name it something that is simple and very close to what you have in mind to sell. It will be easy for people to remember it and recommend it. Use humor when you can, because there is nothing more attractive than something that makes you smile. Your website is your space on the web, your virtual shop. Do not compromise in anyway on this. Though there are many free ways to get this done, do not cut corners here. Choose professionals with proven credentials and be very demanding for its quality. This is what your customers will visit and hence it should be highly qualitative. The cost of a good website design will be $100-200, or you could hire a freelance on sites like Scriptlace. Your website should be having exceptional content and be peppered with the keywords that attract attention to your product. For those who need to do the website themselves, check out W3Schools. You could learn sufficient from here to build your own website. Once the website is okayed, you will need to have it hosted. Again, do not compromise of cost. Choose a web-host which offers 99.9 uninterrupted uptime, 24X7 technical support, and large bandwidth so your website can be viewed simultaneously by as many people as possible.

4. Set up your shopping cart and secure payment method :–

You will need to have a safe and secure shopping cart such as Paypal which will be responsible for setting up a secure payment option on your website. This will enable people to pay by credit card as well. Unless you have a secure way to receive payment, your customer will not be able to buy your product.

5. Promote your business actively :–

Just as in real life shops, you need to advertise your product and shop, you will need to promote and advertise your wares on the Internet. This will create traffic to your website. The best way to do this is by achieving high page rank in organic search such as google.com, yahoo.com, etc. Your website will need to be submitted manually to the most popular search engines, as per their dictates. Check out directories such as BOTW which can improve your ranking greatly. Once you have done that, you will need to establish back links. This can be done by exchanging links with similar websites which is very slow, but with time, you will have as much as you need and more. Then there are Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns which will bring customers to your web and promote your product to them.

Final thoughts of the author :-

Becoming an e-entrepreneur is not difficult today. You have the tools right here on the Net, you have the know-how on the Net too, and the investment required will be within $500 in all. This is opportunity knocking at your door – open the door wide for it. For once, you have nothing to loose and everything to gain in setting up a business – this is what e-entrepreneurship is!